


Let Them Wash Off in the Rain

by talithan



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-16 23:56:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1366438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/talithan/pseuds/talithan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before Harry ever saw Draco’s room, before they ever shared a greasy order of chips or long-held secrets, before Draco’s boss ever tried to chat up Harry, they hadn’t even exchanged mobile numbers. To be fair, Draco didn’t have a mobile then.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let Them Wash Off in the Rain

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Found A Way](https://archiveofourown.org/works/969020) by [disapparater](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disapparater/pseuds/disapparater). 



> Disapparater, I was so thrilled to come across this in your masterlist, as it’s positively brimming with things I love to read and love to write—some larger tropes and themes that I always enjoy, but also smaller details that caught my interest immediately. I loved working with it, and I hope you enjoy my take on the story!
> 
> A million thank-you’s to Haley for listening to my brainstorming as this story took shape over many months, for the encouragement, and for being my first reader. Thank you to the mods for their patience and understanding and for running this wonderful fest.
> 
> The title is borrowed from “Nobody, Not Even the Rain” by La Dispute, and elements of the story are inspired by _The Lover’s Dictionary_ by David Levithan, albeit vaguely.

Harry’s grin is relaxed and unfamiliar. Draco has seen Harry smile, and often. But Harry never smiles quite like this, never in this languorous sort of way. His eyelids look heavy as he watches Draco over the top of his glasses.

They’re nursing mugs of tea, as they so often are, but they aren’t at their usual café. They’re on Harry’s sofa. It’s past eleven, and they’ve come here after several rounds of drinks at the pub nearest Draco’s workplace.

“Is Granger here tonight, then?” Draco asks. He’s remembering the last time he was here, when she came in at almost midnight and had already dropped a stack of books on the table and sat beside him on the sofa before recognising him, giving him a long, hard stare, and greeting him icily.

“I think she’s at Hogwarts,” Harry says, in a lazy tone that matches his grin. “She hasn’t been by in a few days.” He leans in closer to Draco and adds, “We’re all alone, don’t worry.”

Draco shifts, letting his shoulder sink into the cushions as he angles his body toward Harry’s. “I’m not worried,” he says. Quietly. They’re so close now.

Harry smiles, and this one is new too. He’s looking at Draco over his glasses, but at this distance, he probably doesn’t need the lenses to keep Draco’s features in focus.

“You know,” Harry says, “I think about kissing you a lot.”

—

The first time Harry saw Draco’s bedroom, he recoiled. He maintains that he didn’t, but Draco saw him. All right, perhaps not _recoiled_ , but he quickly stepped back out from the room, and there was something stronger than confusion or surprise on his face. It was just for a moment, but Draco saw it, saw him suppress his automatic reaction before he stepped back in and surveyed the small space.

The room hosts a single bed, a nightstand, a wardrobe, and a desk so small that Draco hesitates to call it a desk, with an accompanying stool. There is one narrow window with a view of nothing but the house across, and a bit of sky and a bit of garden if he leans close enough.

It isn’t much, but Draco thinks it’s tremendous.

He’d thought so since the first time he saw it. Even with Harry there, Draco still thought it was tremendous. He did also think, though, that it may have been a bad idea to bring Harry upstairs. It had been four months. Maybe four months wasn’t long enough; Draco hadn’t seen Harry’s home yet.

“It’s not what I’d pictured,” Harry said.

“What did you picture?”

Harry shrugged, approaching the narrow window to appraise the view.

“It’s about half the size of the other three bedrooms,” Draco said, because Harry wouldn’t, “but I have it to myself, and I don’t need much space. I’m only really ever here if I’m sleeping, or if I want to be alone for some reason. The kitchen’s on the lower level, but you saw the rest, the sitting room’s comfortable enough.”

He sat down on the bed.

“Something troubling you?” he asked, because Harry was still looking out the window.

“Who all else lives here?”

“Well, you met Mark on his way to the toilet,” Draco started, “and Catherine owns the place, she’s in the third floor bedroom, and Becky and Jenny share the room next to mine. They’re students. Mark’s a writer, works from home, and Catherine works in an office.”

“It’s a lot like my house,” Harry said, turning back around to face him. “The one I inherited from Sirius, I mean.”

Draco wondered whether he’d misjudged Harry’s silence. “Don’t you live alone?”

Harry nodded. “But friends pop in and out and sometimes stay for a while.” His eyes met Draco’s. “It’s nice having other people around, isn’t it?”

He hovered for a moment before sitting down beside Draco on the bed. They hadn’t planned this. Harry had offered to walk Draco home, and Draco might not have invited him in if it hadn’t started raining during the walk.

“You can apparate from inside,” he’d said. “It’ll be faster.”

But then Mark had been in the hall when they came in and Draco had made hasty introductions, and it would have been hard to explain why he’d brought a friend over only to have him leave immediately, so Draco figured he may as well show Harry around.

Not that there had been much to show.

He wasn’t sure what to do now. They could talk more, like they always did when they sat beside each other on benches or across from each other at café tables, but they’d already done that this afternoon. They’d talked over lunch and they’d talked as they walked, and sitting next to Harry wasn’t new, but sitting with him on a bed was.

There was something new here, now, in the inches between his left leg and Harry’s right, in Harry’s presence in the place where he came to sleep and be alone.

—

Before Harry ever saw Draco’s room, before they ever shared a greasy order of chips or long-held secrets, before Draco’s boss ever tried to chat up Harry, they hadn’t even exchanged mobile numbers. To be fair, Draco didn’t have a mobile then. At that point, they were still exchanging short letters by owl post.

 _Free to catch up again?_ Harry asked in his first note. The tawny owl had scratched at Draco’s window until he’d groggily realised it wasn’t part of his dream and let it in. It tried to leave once the single-line letter was delivered, but as Draco had no owl of his own, he forced it to wait as he scribbled a response.

Done with work at eight, he wrote. _Same café would be fine._

They continued like that for three weeks, but as it had already been difficult to keep his housemates from noticing the weekly owls from his mother, it was nearly impossible to disguise the more frequent visits from Harry’s bird. When setting up a bird feeder outside his window as misdirection only proved to make Jenny more intrigued, Draco sought a more effective solution.

“Amirah keeps asking whether I’ve got a ‘mobile’ yet,” he said wearily. “I’m assuming she’s referring to one of those communication devices and not a decoration to hang over my bed.”

Harry grinned and reached into his pocket. “She means a mobile telephone,” he said, holding his out. “Have you used a telephone yet?”

Draco nodded. “Sometimes I answer the one at work. I didn’t realise these were the same thing.” He turned it over in his hands. Muggles were awfully good at making things compact. “Do you know where I can get myself one of these, then?”

Draco wasn’t working that day, which meant they’d met much earlier in the afternoon than usual. After Draco’s new mobile telephone was bought and paid for, they lingered on the sidewalk outside the store.

“It’s later than I thought,” Harry said, checking his watch. “Nearly six. Do you want to—maybe—” He stopped without finishing.

“Aren’t you going to show me how to use this thing?”

Harry smiled. “Right—of course. Let’s grab a bite while we’re at it, yeah?”

Draco led him to a place that served excellent sandwiches, and as they sat side by side, Harry walked him through the basics of mobile communication.

“There are a few options,” he started. “Have you ever left or received voicemails?”

Draco shook his head. “Answered a few calls and that’s it, really.”

“All right, so—you can call people and if they answer you can talk to each other, obviously, but if they don’t answer you can leave a message, with your voice. A voicemail. Kind of like a howler, but quieter, and nicer. And then there’s also a text option, which might be the easiest once you know how to do it—”

He set down his panini, made a halfhearted attempt at wiping his fingers on a napkin, and picked up his own mobile.

“Here, see—” he said, and Draco watched as Harry’s thumb pressed wildly at the buttons. After a few moments, Draco’s mobile made a loud beeping sound. “It’s called an SMS,” Harry said. “See, if you press here,” he demonstrated, guiding Draco’s thumb to the button, “you can read it. There’s a character limit, so it’s not a perfect replacement for sending letters by owl, though if you got yourself a computer we could email and that really is just like letters only much faster, and—” He stopped suddenly, grinning. “This is a lot, isn’t it. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s all right,” Draco said.

“No, I can slow it down. You won’t need to know half this information anyway.”

He stuck to the most basic of basics after that, demonstrating how to make calls. Sat at the same table as they were, it felt a bit silly to talk into the small devices instead of directly to each other, but Draco could see how it would make communication much easier. And aside from his house not being connected to the Floo network, he’d never much appreciated sticking his head into fires anyway.

—

“I think about kissing you a lot,” Harry says.

Draco doesn’t respond. Or he does, but with a straightening of his shoulders, and the placement of his feet on the floor.

“I don’t mean about _kissing you a lot_ ,” Harry clarifies in the face of Draco’s silence. “I mean I think about kissing you, and I think about it a lot—often. I think about it often. But when I think about it I _do_ do it a lot, the kissing. Sometimes just the one kiss but usually a lot of kisses, all one after another. Some really heavy snogging. I was thinking about it all during dinner, and how there would probably be cheese in your teeth, but I’d do it anyway.”

“There’s never cheese in my teeth,” Draco says. “Malfoys don’t get cheese in their teeth.”

“You don’t think about kissing me, do you,” Harry says.

“Would you be licking my teeth, then? Is that what ‘really heavy snogging’ entails? I’ve never licked anyone’s teeth.”

“You don’t,” Harry repeats. “It’s all right if you don’t. You can say so.”

“I know it’s all right.” Draco shifts on the sofa, straightening his shoulders. “I also know you’re drunk, probably.”

“You probably know? I’m not drunk, Draco. I’m just—brave, is all.”

“Well, that much I knew already.”

“Wine-brave,” Harry says. “Wine-boosted bravery. I’ve been thinking about it for ages.”

Ages. They’ve been friends for eight months, give or take. How long—“What else do you think about?”

“I think about your smile. I like making you smile. I think you’ve been smiling a lot more since we became friends and I think it might be narcissistic of me to take credit for that, but I don’t care. I think about kissing your smile—that sounds strange. Kissing you while you’re smiling. Or kissing your cheek while you’re smiling, or kissing your forehead. I’d really like to kiss you good night, I think. Or good morning. I would really love to sleep beside you.”

“You sound as though you’ve been dosed with Veritaserum.”

“You believe me, then?”

Draco can’t imagine ever _not_ believing Harry, always so unthinkingly straightforward. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant—you’re babbling.”

“We always talk like this.”

“No,” Draco says, “not like this.”

Harry’s eyes are focused, clear. “You don’t think about it.”

Draco sets down his mug and smooths the seams on the fronts of his trouser legs. “Not in the habitual way you’re describing, no.”

“But you have?”

“I thought about it while you were talking about it.”

“Before, though.”

Draco closes his eyes. “Once,” he says. “When you walked me home.”

—

When he received his first voicemail, he was on break at work. There were only three minutes left, as he hadn’t yet adjusted to the idea of checking his mobile in any sort of habitual way, and it only occurred to him after the fact that he probably could have listened to the message while having a smoke rather than afterwards when his break was already almost up.

The polite but monotone voice told him to press 1 to listen to the message, and so he took the phone from his ear to find the ‘1’ button, pressed it, and brought it back to his ear. By that time, it had already begun playing.

“…ssing, but I thought it might be easier like this,” Harry was saying, “so I wouldn’t have to look at you while I read it, and you wouldn’t be looking at me either. I’m sorry if it’s weird. And I’m sorry if it’s bad, too. But—well, here it goes.”

Then, Harry read him a sonnet.

Draco was so surprised that it took him a moment to comprehend what the polite but monotone voice was telling him as the message was finishing, but it told him what button to press to replay it, and he pressed it immediately.

When he brought it back to his ear, Harry was saying, “too embarrassing, but I thought it might be easier like this…”

He listened to it three more times, but he never managed to catch the first few words of the message. He also went over his allotted break time by six minutes. It didn’t matter, though.

Harry had read him a sonnet. A sonnet Harry had written. A sonnet he hadn’t shared with anyone else.

—

Draco hadn’t had nearly as much trouble adjusting to muggle technology as one might have assumed. Or rather, as much as Harry _did_ assume. During their second round of ‘catching up’, he was insistent that Draco was playing down the level of difficulty out of embarrassment.

“Think about it, though,” Draco had said. “Imagine you’ve never made tea. Not ever, in your whole life. And now you have to learn how to use a kettle. It’s going to be new either way, see? I learned it the muggle way, but given that I’d never learned the wizard way, it wasn’t much extra trouble.”

“You didn’t try to light the stove with your wand?” Harry asked sceptically.

“I’d never used a stove, so…no.”

Harry held his chin in his palm, elbows on the table, his other hand resting loosely on his mug. “Incredible. What about your clothing? Do you do your own laundry?”

Draco nodded, and he was too pleased at Harry’s resulting grin to feel embarrassed.

—

His decision to live in the muggle world hadn’t happened as Harry had assumed, either. It wasn’t sudden or drastic; he hadn’t dramatically cut all ties with friends, family, and magic all at once.

It started during the wait for his mother’s trial. There had been debate over whether to start with the worst of the worst or the ones already assumed innocent; was it right to hold those who were practically guaranteed acquittal in Azkaban for months while those who’d receive life sentences had their trials? Someone had the idea to keep those who didn’t pose a threat under observation rather than in prison cells. Because Malfoy Manor had been the Dark Lord’s headquarters for so long, it was determined an unsafe location to be thoroughly searched and purged by Aurors, so Draco and his mother were sent to stay at, of all places, the Leaky Cauldron. (His father, on the other hand, was held in a prison cell.)

Narcissa chose to be present for many of the trials, but Draco had no such urges, and he wasn’t keen on the Auror that tailed him whenever he ventured out into Diagon Alley. When he learned that he’d be allowed out into the muggle world without an Auror so long as he surrendered his wand beforehand and had a tracking charm on him at all times, he decided he may as well give it a go. The trips became frequent; soon, he was going every day.

He quickly realised it would be much easier to buy actual muggle clothes than to continue transfiguring his own clothing into an approximation of muggle dress before surrendering his wand each time. Clothing prices proved prohibitive, as he and his mother only had access to a small portion of the Malfoy fortune, but then he found out firsthand why secondhand clothing had been appealing for the Weasleys. When you don’t have much, it feels less important whether someone else has worn your shirt before.

And secondhand didn’t mean holes and tears and worn-down seams, necessarily. There were reasonably fashionable secondhand stores, some that seemed well-curated and perhaps even prided themselves on their selection. The customers would search the racks with enthusiasm, eager to find an underpriced gem. At one such shop, Draco bought a pair of dark jeans. The next week, he came back to buy a jacket. The week after that, two shirts.

On his sixth visit, Amirah surprised him by saying, “Are you applying or not?”

“Excuse me?” he said, looking from her to the register to the grey trousers in his hands with confusion.

“Every time you’re in here,” she said, “you stare at that sign for five minutes, sigh, and come up to the counter to pay without saying anything. As you can see, the sign’s still up. Are you applying or not?”

He hadn’t meant to stare, hadn’t known he’d been doing it, but he believed her. His mother’s trial had passed. The Aurors had estimated that the Manor would be inhabitable in another couple of weeks. He’d started noticing ‘help wanted’ and ‘now hiring’ signs at every shop he passed. The fall term at Hogwarts would start next month, and he didn’t plan on attending.

He left blank much more of the application than would have been preferable and was unable to disguise his utter cluelessness during the interview. “You make an odd impression,” Amirah told him, “but you’re certainly memorable.”

He came back ten days later (as Amirah had instructed after his inability to produce any remotely useable contact information) and was offered a part-time position on a trial basis. His mother went back to the manor and he didn’t. Zabini and Goyle went back to Hogwarts (the latter as a condition of his probation) and he didn’t. One of the Aurors assigned to watch him went to Auror Robards personally to recommend that they no longer waste resources on Draco Malfoy, as he clearly posed no threat whatsoever; due to testimony from one Harry Potter in Narcissa Malfoy’s trial, and given Draco’s age when he received the dark mark, it was decided no trial would be necessary.

As it stood, though, Draco had not completed his education, and because he was not a fully trained wizard, he was ordered to return to Hogwarts. At that point, he’d only have missed the first few weeks of term.

He didn’t want to return to Hogwarts.

Fine then, he was told. They couldn’t force him to go to school. All the same, they couldn’t permit him to do magic as an untrained wizard, he was told.

So he surrendered his wand. For good, this time.

“I don’t miss it,” he told Harry the fourth time they sat at the café. “Some things are easier without it, to be honest.”

His part time job on its own didn’t pay much, and he was given a small monthly allowance from the Malfoy vaults that didn’t cover much either. Together, though, it was enough for a room in a shared house, for a few more shirts and trousers and a good coat, for cigarettes before he’d even noticed he was hooked, for coffees once or twice a week when he wanted to treat himself, and eventually, for dinners with Harry.

It had all been easy, he thought in retrospect. It had been so easy.

—

There were bells on the door of the shop that jangled every time a customer came in or out. For the first couple of weeks, Draco jumped to attention whenever he heard the noise, ready to help anyone who requested his assistance. He grew accustomed to it by the end of the first month, and now he typically didn’t even look up. Most people didn’t want to be bothered, and they seemed uncomfortable if he watched them while they browsed.

When Harry came in, though, he knocked against the doorframe with his knuckles as he stepped over the threshold. He did it twice, just two quick raps, every time he entered. Draco didn’t know why he did it, didn’t know whether he was announcing himself especially to Draco or whether it was a habit whenever he walked any doorway (though, as Draco considered it, Harry had never knocked like that at any of the eating establishments they’d patronised).

This afternoon, the bell jangled, and then there were two quick knocks. Draco looked up.

“Hello, Handsome,” Amirah said.

She called Harry that most of the time. The first time, Draco thought she was flirting, but then he noticed she did that to a lot of people. (Not Draco, though. Twice she’d greeted him with “Hello, Gorgeous,” but both times it seemed facetious.) He still suspected she might be flirting, though.

“Afternoon,” Harry said, smiling. “You’re off soon, yeah?”

“I’m here all day, sadly,” Amirah said. “I’d be off with you in a flash otherwise.”

“I meant Draco,” Harry clarified unnecessarily, but he was still smiling. “I finished up earlier than I thought I would, so I figured I’d come meet you directly.”

They’d been meeting for four months. At first they kept it to tea, but it turned into dinners sometimes, and lunches. Today Draco would be free at three and Harry had evening plans with other friends, so they were going to have a late lunch.

“Another fifteen minutes,” Draco said, but Amirah laughed and shook her head.

“Go have your lunch,” she said, shooing him with her hands.

Amirah loved Harry, and she consistently seemed thrilled that Draco had a friend like him. The first time Harry ever came in, Amirah gave him an appraising look and said, “Is this the one, then?” At Harry’s nonplussed expression, she said, “Finally got a mobile, hasn’t he?” Harry laughed, Amirah smiled, and Draco battled a confusing impulse to step between them.

“I suppose this means you’ve got a mobile yourself?” she said, leaning into the counter.

“Sure do,” Harry said. “My friend made me get one last year. I suppose I was passing on the favour.”

Draco wasn’t sure whether Harry was intentionally sidestepping Amirah’s obvious hint or if he was truly that obtuse, but he was grateful either way. It would have been strange for Harry to date his boss.

Sometimes, though, he wondered whether Amirah was under the impression he and Harry were dating. Times like today, when she did things like wink at him as he followed Harry out of the shop. Did she think they were about to do something other than have lunch? He could never tell with her.

“Do you think Amirah likes you?” he found himself saying.

Harry laughed. “Yeah, I suppose? Would she let you off early to see me if she thought I was scum?”

“She always calls you Handsome instead of Harry.”

“It’s easier than remembering my name, apparently. It’s not as unique and memorable as yours,” Harry said, grinning. “That’s what she told me, at least.”

Draco couldn’t remember her saying that, but then, he didn’t always bother listening to their conversations when Harry came in.

He wasn’t sure that he’d ever describe Harry as handsome, necessarily. He was striking, in a way, with those bright green eyes that were normally seen with paler skin and stood out in Harry’s darker-complected face. His hair was wild in a way that suited him, more so now than it did when he was eleven and scrawny. But Draco found it hard to look at Harry without also seeing that scrawny eleven-year-old boy, and most of the time, without also feeling like a scrawny eleven-year-old boy himself.

After four months, he still couldn’t quite believe he had the friendship that his scrawny eleven-year-old self had dreamed of. Harry Potter came to meet him after work. Harry Potter took him to his favourite Indian restaurant. After lunch, Harry Potter offered to walk him home, since he still had a little while before he had to meet up with his other friends.

 _Other_ friends. Friends other than Draco; Draco was one of his friends, too.

Harry had never seen Draco’s house. They always arranged to meet at the café, or at Draco’s work, or wherever they planned to eat, or one of them called the other and suggested a convenient landmark based on wherever they were at the time. Draco wasn’t sure he’d described where he was living, actually, outside of making it clear he was not living at Malfoy Manor anymore. He wasn’t sure where Harry was living, other than that he lived alone.

“I like to walk,” Harry was saying. “It gives me time to think. Or chat, if I’m walking with someone else. I suppose public transportation does the same, but when you walk you have more space, you know? And I’m never in much of a hurry.”

“It’ll be another ten or so,” Draco said. “If that won’t make you too late.”

“It’s fine. We’re meeting at the pub at seven when Ron’s done at the Ministry.”

Draco nodded. He knew Harry’s friends knew they were spending time together, but he didn’t know how they felt about it. Harry wouldn’t have mentioned if they had all told him it was a terrible idea and Draco was clearly an evil person. There were topics they avoided.

“Oh, fuck,” Harry said suddenly. “Do you have an umbrella?”

Draco gestured sweepingly over his body and felt the first drops of rain hit his nose and wrist. “Does it look like I have an umbrella?”

“Can’t do any water-repelling charms without taking my wand out.”

Harry frowned, stopped walking, and took off his glasses. He put his right hand in his pocket and held his glasses next to his pocket with his left, then put them back on.

“It’s a bit better,” he said. “Though I’m now rethinking how I’m going to get to the pub.”

“Do you want to apparate from mine?” Draco asked. “There’ll be more walking in the rain first, but it’ll be over sooner, and you can dry yourself off once you’re inside.”

“Thanks,” Harry said. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

Draco forgot, most of the time, that Harry had a wand and still routinely did magic. He never forgot Harry was a wizard, and he never forgot that Harry was connected to that world more closely than Draco was now. But he did forget about magic. He never saw Harry use his wand because they always met in public, in front of muggles. It was easy to think that Harry lived the way he did, using a mobile and the Tube and a wallet full of muggle money.

But Harry could keep water off his glasses in the rain. He could disappear and be in his house in an instant.

When they walked over the threshold, Harry didn’t knock against the doorway. He reached up and took off his glasses. “That really didn’t do the job,” he said. He looked up at Draco, blinking his dark, wet lashes and smiling. “Hermione’s a lot better at that than I am, and she doesn’t even wear glasses.”

Draco opened his mouth, but his throat felt dry. He licked his lips to wet them and tasted rainwater.

In the grey light from outside, Harry’s eyes seemed even greener, but it wasn’t that. And wasn’t so much that Harry’s eyes appeared more brilliant when unimpeded by frames and lenses. His glasses did little to dull the colour, or the contrast against his black black lashes and eyebrows and his brown skin. It was more that without the glasses in the way, they no longer looked like Harry Potter’s famous eyes. They were just eyes. They were just eyes in a face, and the years of conditioning to see those eyes and immediately think hateful thoughts disappeared. They were just a pair of brilliant green eyes.

Draco was standing closer to him now, just inside the doorway, than he had when they were outside eight minutes ago and Harry used his wand without removing it from his pocket.

He didn’t feel scrawny or eleven.

“Draco?” someone said, and it wasn’t Harry.

Draco looked to the stairs, where his housemate Mark was standing.

“Mind closing the door?” Mark asked, and Draco complied mutely. “Who’s your friend?”

“I’m Harry,” Harry said.

“Mark,” said Mark. “Good to meet you.” He continued up the stairs.

“Shall I show you around?” Draco asked.

—

The thing about Harry, Draco thinks, is that he doesn’t know what it’s like to be afraid. He’s felt fear, Draco supposes, but he does not know what it is for that fear to be his _state of being_ , for the fear to be constant and pervasive, for the fear to override absolutely everything else.

Harry is a person of action, a person who responds to fear by denying its power.

Draco is not a person of action. Draco is a person of calculation.

“If I kissed you,” Draco says, “would it be a promise?”

“A promise,” Harry repeats.

“I don’t know that I’d like it,” Draco says. “But if I never kiss you, I’ll never know if I would like it. But if I kiss you and I don’t like it, don’t want it, will we be able to go back?”

“Go back to what?”

Draco’s hands close around nothing, and his nails dig into his palms. “I want to be your friend, and I also want to find out whether or not I want to kiss you, and I don’t want to have to choose between them.”

“Why would you have to ch—Do you think friends can’t kiss?”

“But you want to be more than friends.”

The wrinkle between Harry’s eyebrows deepens.

“You do,” Draco says. “You think about kissing me a lot.”

“It’s not _more than_ , though. It’s not as if there are levels and you’re—you’ve hit the ceiling on the friend level and the only way up would be to be _more than friends_. It’s more—there’s a next-door one, one with kissing, and—”

“I’m afraid of the door,” Draco says. “Of opening it, I mean. I’m afraid that once it’s opened it won’t be—re-close-able. I want to know if we can—”

“We can close the door.” Harry’s fingers rest lightly on Draco’s wrist, between them. “If you don’t want to open it, then it’s fine.”

“I don’t want to open it. I just want to—I want to try kissing you. I want to know whether I want to kiss you.”

“There doesn’t even have to be a door.”

“Because there was a—a friend door—there was a friend door, and you opened it, and I don’t want to have to step back out to the other side of it, I don’t think I could, so if you won’t be able to step back out the relationship door, you’re going to have to stop me before—”

“Relationship?” Harry breathes.

“I’m going to kiss you,” Draco says.

—

“I’m taking time off,” Harry had said, the first time.

He stared at Draco as though expecting follow-up questions, so Draco gave him one. “Time off from what?”

Harry only shrugged, but Draco understood. He didn’t know what to say to that, though. He didn’t know what to say to any of this; it was surreal, sitting in a café with Harry Potter, surrounded by muggles. Telling Harry Potter about his life while he sat there and acted interested.

“Actually,” Harry said, and his voice was quieter, almost sheepish. “I’ve begun writing poetry. To pass the time, I suppose. I thought it might be fun to try my hand at it, try something new.”

And this, too, was surreal, but in a different way.

He wondered, then, why Harry would make himself vulnerable like that. He wondered whether Harry was truly interested when he asked after Draco’s life. He wondered whether this might not be a one-time thing.

—

“I think Amirah thought you were homeless,” Harry said over dinner about six months later.

Draco considered this as he chewed and swallowed. “Well, I was, wasn’t I? I didn’t have a home that whole summer.”

“I don’t mean literally homeless,” Harry said. “I mean—” he gestured vaguely with his fork—“impoverished, destitute, impecunious—”

“Are you trying to impress me with your vocabulary?”

“I’m trying to explain that I was not referring only to your living situation,” Harry said, and forked rice into his mouth.

“All right, well in addition to that, you have also impressed me with your vocabulary.” Draco reached for his glass of water. “Why do you think she thought I was destitute?”

“You were saying before that you couldn’t understand why she offered you a job, given your qualifications.”

“Or lack thereof.”

“Exactly,” Harry said. “And I’m saying, I think she thought you were in need, so she helped you out.”

“You think she gave me a job out of pity?”

“Pity—no, not pity, exactly. But, I mean, she could tell that you were a good person, and she could tell you needed help, but she sort of incorrectly filled in the finer details. Such as, instead of inferring that you were a rich wizard and that was why you had no familiarity with muggle customs or technology, or the process of finding gainful employment, she came up with her own explanation for why you didn’t have an address or contact information, and why you always stare at muggle money like it’s something strange and incredible.”

Draco didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t that he disagreed, though he hadn’t ever considered that explanation for Amirah’s kindness to him. It was that he’d never heard Harry describe him as a good person, and so earnestly, too.

“I was just thinking about it because, well, I had a bit of a different idea of you at first, too,” Harry said. “I mean, when I first saw you living as a muggle,” he added quickly, because they didn’t talk about what they’d thought of each other when they were younger.

“Different how?” Draco said.

“I thought you were lonely,” Harry said.

“Wait,” Draco said. “Is that why—did you feel sorry for me? Was that it? ”

“No,” Harry said immediately, “of course not. I was surprised, that’s all. It wasn’t what I’d expected. You weren’t what I’d expected. I always thought—” He cut himself off suddenly.

“You always thought…?”

Harry pressed his lips together before answering. “I wondered about you sometimes, you know. After I gave your wand back, I thought it would all be done, and we’d be adults about it if we ever saw each other again. But we didn’t see each other again. I went back to school, and you didn’t, and nobody was sure what had happened to you, outside of vague rumours. So I wondered if I’d ever run into you. If I’d find myself at Madam Malkins again, and we’d have a fresh start, or something.

“And then I see you on an ordinary muggle street, of all places, and you don’t look anything like the you I had in my head, and I start wondering new things, like what kind of job you have, and if you have muggle friends, and if you still talk to your friends from school. And at first you seem really sad, but in a passive sort of way—defeated, I guess. And I thought that meant you were living in isolation, or something, and missed magic and your family, but then I meet Amirah and you tell me about your housemates and how you have a family dinner every Thursday and you and Becky always buy groceries together and Catherine’s cat sits in your lap while you read.”

Draco stared.

“You were different,” Harry said. “You weren’t what I thought.”

“I was lonely,” Draco said.

Harry blinked.

“You don’t have to be completely alone to feel lonely.”

“You don’t seem lonely,” Harry said.

“I said I _was_ lonely,” Draco said. “I’m not anymore.”

—

The strangest part of it all was realising how little his time before Harry’s friendship meant to him in retrospect. It had felt so brilliant at the time but when he thought back to it, after, it all blended together. There were his housemates, there was Amirah, there was work, there were letters from his mother. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, but now it didn’t seem there was anything _right_ about it either. He was surviving, not thriving.

The thing was—the thing that made it strange—his time now blended together too. There were his housemates, and Amirah, and work, and letters from his mother. And there was Harry. Dinners with Harry, voicemails from Harry, walks with Harry, drinks with Harry. Harry had become an integral part of his life’s schema, and he fit so naturally that Draco now had trouble thinking of his life before their friendship as complete.

He wouldn’t have believed it, that first time they met. Certainly not the very first time, as children, but even less so the second first time.

—

“Good tea,” Harry said.

“It’s all right.”

Harry drummed his fingers around the cup in his hands.

Draco watched.

“It was such a surprise running into you,” Harry said.

“I work down the street from here,” Draco said.

“Oh, you do?”

Draco couldn’t tell whether Harry’s surprise was in response to Draco working near this café or in response to Draco working, period. “Yes. I’m living outside the wizarding world, as you can see,” Draco said, referring not only to their present location but also to his muggle attire, “for obvious reasons.”

Harry nodded, looking almost interested.

—

Five months later, they sat in the same café, and Draco held his mobile to his ear while Harry avoided eye contact. The voicemail was left two hours earlier, while Draco had been at work. Harry always made these calls while Draco was at work so that he would definitely have to leave a voicemail.

Harry’s eyes fixed on his mug, on the hem of Draco’s sleeve, on his own fingernails, and Draco listened. He didn’t always pay that much attention to the words; he knew Harry wasn’t after anything resembling literary criticism. Draco focused most on the rhythm of Harry’s words, on the strange intimacy of listening to the quiet voice in the message rather than talking directly to the person sitting across from him.

“That was a good one,” Draco said when it finished. “I liked ‘fussed’ and ‘ballast’ for that final couplet.”

Harry didn’t usually respond, and he didn’t tonight. He smiled, though, and stopped looking away from Draco’s eyes.

It wasn’t much, but Draco thought it was tremendous.

—

“I’m going to kiss you,” Draco says.

He reaches for Harry’s glasses with both hands and carefully removes them, setting them out of the way on the coffee table. Brighter eyes and darker, starker lashes. Harry’s brows are drawn tight, but his lips are slack, soft.

Draco leans close and tries to remember what you do with your mouth when kissing. He keeps his lips relaxed, slightly parted, and closes his eyes, measuring Harry’s breaths for a moment before closing those final centimetres.

It’s not _really heavy snogging_ , it’s gentle, and Draco can’t help feeling the moment is being savoured. Harry barely moves, allowing Draco to guide the kiss. When Draco pulls back, Harry lets him.

Draco’s eyes are still closed as Harry speaks. “There doesn’t have to be a door,” he says, very quietly. “It’s—we don’t have to do that again, not if you don’t want to. But I just—first kisses aren’t always enough to—you can’t necessarily—”

“No,” Draco says, opening his eyes, “that was—it wasn’t—” He takes a breath. Harry still isn’t wearing his glasses. “I liked it,” Draco says, and leans in again.

Harry responds this time. He cups Draco’s face, thumb tracing his cheekbone, fingers in his hair. And Draco lets himself reach for Harry, too.

 _Easy_ , he reminds himself. It’s all so easy.

—

It had been easy to leave the wizarding world. That world had changed; it was not the world Draco had known. Diagon Alley was not the same Diagon Alley he had visited as a child. It was different, and Draco was different.

He missed magic, he did. He missed it whenever he thought about it. But it had been easy to give up the wand that had killed the Dark Lord. He hadn’t used it after Harry gave it back to him, not once.

“It’s not that I don’t want to ever go back,” Draco said. He didn’t like to talk about the past with Harry like this, but he was on his third drink of the night and so was Harry, and it didn’t seem important to avoid it. “It’s more that—I don’t know how to go back. It’s not the same.”

“Different isn’t always bad,” Harry said. He wasn’t being awkward like Draco had always worried he would, every time he avoided letting conversations with Harry go in this direction.

“But I’m not the same, either. I don’t belong there like I used to.”

“Why would not being the same mean you don’t belong, though? It’s not—it’s not as though there was a Draco-shaped space that got all melted and you lost an arm and now you can’t—”

“I lost an arm?”

“You _didn’t_ lose an arm,” Harry said. “What I mean is, you’re not the same, but it’s not a physical not-the-same, and your space wasn’t a physical space. Maybe your old space can’t fit you like it used to because you’re different, and it’s different, but what if there’s a different space that fits the new Draco shape? A space you never tried before, but it’s there, and it’s waiting for you.”

“You aren’t making any sense,” Draco said fondly.

“I’m saying you can go back, if you want to. Because, you know, you’ll never find it if you never look for it. You won’t find it here, you know. And maybe this is your space, maybe you belong here, but if you miss it, well, that’s probably where you belong.”

“You’re such a philosophical drunk,” Draco said.

“I’m not drunk,” Harry said. “Want to come to mine?”

“Another round,” Draco said, because talking about the past with Harry like this was actually very enjoyable. “Another round, and we can go to yours.”

—

“Malfoy?”

Draco turned on the spot, searching for the source of the voice he wasn’t sure he wanted to recognise.

“It _is_ you,” Harry Potter said.

Draco absorbed the glasses, the messy hair, the clothes that he could now recognise as unfashionable even by muggle standards. “And it’s you,” Draco said.

A light drizzle began to fall, and Draco wondered whether it would be impolite to excuse himself and try to make it home before the rain got heavier.

“Why don’t we catch up a bit?” Harry asked.

Draco stared at him, baffled.

Harry indicated the café they were standing just outside. “A warm drink to wait out the rain would be nice, don’t you think?”

Draco couldn’t think of any pressing reason to turn him down, and so he followed him inside.

—

The first time Draco sees Harry’s room is after Harry whispers, “Would you like to stay over?” against Draco’s mouth and Draco kisses him in assent.

He doesn’t see much of the room, really. Harry doesn’t bother turning on the light, guiding Draco to the bed in the dark. Blindly, Draco kicks off his trousers and throws his shirt in the not-bed direction. Harry tosses the bedcovers aside and pulls Draco close, and Draco runs his fingers over Harry’s bare back and does not feel afraid.

They kiss for hours and learn the feel of each other in the dark, mapping each other’s bodies with their hands. They kiss until they fall asleep, and Draco drifts off with Harry’s warmth pressed to his back.

When he wakes up and rolls over to face Harry, the relaxed smile that greets him is familiar.

**Author's Note:**

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